A Simple Method for Clarifying Sentences with Coordination Ambiguities

摘要

We present a simple, broad coverage method for clarifying the meaning of sentences with coordination ambiguities, a frequent cause of parse errors. For each of the two most likely parses involving a coordination ambiguity, we produce a disambiguating paraphrase that splits the sentence in two, with one conjunct appearing in each half, so that the span of each conjunct becomes clearer. In a validation study, we show that the method enables meaning judgments to be crowd-sourced with good reliability, achieving 83% accuracy at 80% coverage.